David Gerard writes;
Our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to
participation.
Yes.
* Starting from a clear field makes it ridiculously
easy.
We could start with solutions for first-time posters, new articles,
and new talk-page comments -- any comprehensive solution should be
compatible with short-term solutions that solve this 'ridiculously
easy' part -- which happens to address what many first-time editors
need.
Stephanie Daugherty writes:
Not only is the current markup a barrier to
participation, it's a barrier to
development. As I argued on Wikien-l, starting over with a markup that can
< be
syntacticly validated... would reap huge rewards in the safety
and effectiveness
of automated tools.
A lack of WYSIWY* is often a barrier to adoption of MediaWiki as
opposed to other wiki platforms, independent of whether or not
potential editors who visit a MW site feel comfortale editing it. I
recall that P2PU for instance wanted to run MW but used pbwiki instead
because of its WYSIWYG editor.
By aiming for WYSIWYM, some things would render in the
editor in a
way that makes them easier to understand and edit. For example, templates
could render in the editor as tables or as a block that loads the template
<
parameters into a sidebar when clicked... WYSIWYM editors can be friendly
to both experienced and new users alike - take LyX as
a good example
Victor writes;
I always viewed wikitext vs. WYSIWYG dilemma as
similar to LaTeX vs.
Microsoft Word one.
In this context, LyX is a good example; it sees its WYSIWYM
implementation as halfway between the two.
Stephanie writes:
Layouts would be a new form of template, designed to
apply as a
block-level outline to an article, providing both a framework to build a
particular type of article, and defining the formatting for that article in
a manner that templates and article markup would no longer be permitted to
do. It's likely that layouts would be treated like highly used templates and
< the interface itself... one to an article, so the interface to
select one would
probably be just selecting it from a dropdown or
typing it's name.
I really like the idea of separating article text, local templates,
and page-wide layout. I don't know if 'three different paresers' are
needed, but just being able to define a stylesheet for a named layout
would save time and frustration.
Brion writes:
Getting anything done that would work on the huge,
well-developed,
wildly-popular Wikipedia has always been a non-starter because it has to
deal with 10 years of backwards-compatibility from the get-go. I think it's
going to be a *lot* easier to get things going on those smaller projects
which are now so poorly served
How do we make it easier to implement new things for individual
smaller projects?
For the Wikipedia case, we need to incubate the next
generation of templating
Is this a problem space we could tackle in tandem with MindTouch and
others who care about simple interfaces to edit and view complex
information?
Sam.
--
Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266